Archive for October, 2008

The White House and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson are seeking to scale back a proposal by Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair to guarantee mortgages to help stem foreclosures, according to two congressional aides briefed on the matter.

The Bush administration is reluctant to sign off on the plan because of its cost, the two people indicated. Bair’s idea to provide guarantees for modified loans could take as much as $50 billion from the $700 billion bailout package approved by Congress this month.

So $700 billion to bail out financial corporations is an OMG-must-have, but $50 billion to bail out homeowners is just too much. “Oh gee, sorry son, I can’t get you new clothes this year, I just spent $250,000 on a sports car. I have to be fiscally responsible, you see. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”

Regnery’s latest book (by its own executive editor, no less) is all about how the Confederacy was Teh Awesome and totally misunderstood:

The politically correct history that dominates our schools and universities today insists that Jefferson Davis was another Hitler, Robert E. Lee was the equivalent of Rommel, and the Confederate States of America was our own little version of the Third Reich — a blot on American history. But reality, as always, was different: the Old South, as H. W. Crocker III explains in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, had immense charm, grace and merit — and a very strong Constitutional case. This book is a joyful myth-busting rebel yell that shatters today’s Leftist and demeaning stereotypes about the South and the Civil War — and shows why, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, “America and the whole world is crying out for the spirit of the Old South.

(…)

This is the Politically Incorrect Guide that every Civil War buff and Southern partisan — and everyone who is tired of liberal self-hatred that vilifies America’s greatest heroes — will have to have on his bookshelf, in his classroom, and under his Christmas tree.

Fantastic. The basic premise appears to be that the South was more anti-slavery and less racist than the North. Which seems a bit odd, since THEY WERE THE ONES WITH THE SLAVES.

People who begin with the premise that the Democrats must be wrong find inexplicable the electorate’s apparent embrace of the Democratic message on healthcare, the economy, the war(s), social security, and energy security.

Comes now one “Dr. William D. Horton” (with an assist from Dr. Rush Limbaugh) to explain this seeming contradiction between what they take to be the natural order and the consensual reality we seem to inhabit.

Can you guess what they say explains Barack Obama’s national appeal?

No, it’s not the substance — that’s ruled out by hypothesis. It’s….wait for it…..hypnosis.

Yes, in this demented worldview, the US of A is being subjected to nearly diabolical mind control as the soothing slow voice of Barack Obama gently eases the viewing public to surrender its reason and its freedom via the application of neurolinguistic programming. It’s so controlling, so clever, so soothing, that it’s JUST LIKE HITLER. (As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. The video being circulated by these guys culminates with footage of Hitler and jackboots.) The only way to survive is DON’T LISTEN TO HIM.

According to a source in the audience Sarah Palin got a big arousing boo when she took the [stage] in Erie just minutes ago. Palin was not properly prepared and congratulated the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies. Any local could have told her that wasn’t the local team of choice.

Yeah, PA may not be as big as Alaska, but it’s a big enough state to have baseball teams on either side of it, and Erie is firmly on the Pittsburgh Pirates side of the state, and could care less about the Phillies. Way to rub it into the fans whose team hasn’t had a winning season in 16 years.

Yes, that’s right – Republicans still don’t know the difference between 24 and the real world, so they think torturers are actually war heroes:

In August 2003, Colonel Allen West – commanding a US unit in Baghdad – heard a rumour that one of the Iraqi policeman he was working with was a secret insurgent. He ordered his officers to go and seize Yehiya Hamoodi, a thin, bespectacled 31-year-old, from his home. They dragged him into a Humvee, beat him, and then handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded him. In a dank interrogation room, they told him he had better start talking.

Perplexed and terrified, Yehiya explained he didn’t know what they were talking about: why was he here? So West was called in. He told Yehiya he was going to be killed. While his men beat him again, he explained he had one last chance to save his life – by talking.

Yehiya protested: I am innocent! What are you talking about? So West took him outside, had him pinned down, and began to shoot. First he fired into the air. Then he ordered his men to ram Yehiya’s head into a barrel used for cleaning weapons – and fired right next to his head. Then he began to count down from five. Finally Yehiya began to scream out names – any name he could think of, just to make it stop.

The men he named were seized and roughed up in turn. No evidence was found of any plot, and after another 45 days of terror, Yehiya was released. Today, he is severely traumatised, and collapses when he sees a Humvee approaching. The story only came to light after one of West’s soldiers began to protest against these practices, and the Pentagon launched an investigation. At a pre-trial hearing, West was fined $5,000, and now concedes grudgingly: “It’s possible I was wrong about Mr Hamoodi.” But he says he would do it again, and again, and again.

West has even taken to joking about it, gaining applause for telling Republican audiences: “It wasn’t torture. Seeing Rosie O’Donnell naked would be torture.” But the 1994 Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, is explicit: “Threat of imminent death” is the third form of torture it outlaws. There are reams of studies showing it can traumatise a person for life.

(…)

West’s “toughness” is fawned over; one leading conservative magazine has even named him its Man of the Year. And Sarah Palin, the Party’s darling, mocks Barack Obama’s opposition to torture. She complains: “Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America [and] he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”…

(…)

The gap between the Republican and Democratic Parties is too narrow, but on this issue it is hefty. The Republicans have curdled into the Party of Torture, bullying their torture-victim nominee into backing their barbarism, and proudly picking a torturer as their candidate for Congress. That sound of screaming from inside the Palin-drome isn’t just from fawning Republicans – it’s from men like Yehiya.

That last paragraph says it all. It’s pretty hard to deny being the party of torturers when you actually run one for Congress.

For those who are wondering, West is running against first-term Democratic incumbent Ron Klein in FL-22. It’s a district Kerry won in ’04, and Klein is favored, so hopefully we won’t actually end up with a torturer in Congress. But again, it’s telling that the Republicans would not only field a torturer for major public office, but actually believe that his background is a selling point.

The homophobic chutzpah is just amazing. Apparently, the people who want to let gays keep getting married are just like Adolf Hitler. Yes, the bigots are comparing themselves to those who opposed Hitler.

There was another time in history when people, when the bell tolled. And the question was whether or not they were going to hear it. The time was during Nazi Germany with Adolf Hitler. You see he brought crowds of clergy together to assure them that he was going to look after the church.

And one of the members, bold and courageous, Reverend [Niemoller] made his way to the front and (inaudible) said “Hitler, we are not concerned about the church. Jesus Christ will take care of the church.

We are concerned about the soul of Germany.” Embarrassed and chagrined, his peers quickly shuffled him to the back.

And as they did Adolf Hitler said, “The soul of Germany, you can leave that to me.” And they did, and because they did bombs did not only fall upon the nation of Germany, but also upon the church and their testimony to this very day.

Let us not make that mistake folks. Let us hear the bell! Vote on Proposition 8!

So I guess this means that if Proposition 8 fails, it will be like the Holocaust for marriage, as all straight marriages will be exterminated by the destructive force of Teh Ghey. No-one has ever satisfactorily explained how this would happen, but the religious righties seem to know it with absolute certainty.

If you’re in CA, please vote No on 08, and ask everyone you know to do the same.

Wolf Blitzer: And this just coming into the “Situation Room,” the Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin now speaking out openly about her intentions in 2012 if, if she and John McCain were to lose this contest next Tuesday. In an interview with ABC News, Sarah Palin is now saying, she would be interested in remaining a serious national political figure, going ahead to 2012. She was asked what happens in 2012 if you lose on Tuesday, would you simply go back to Alaska? Elizabeth Vargas of ABC News asked her and Palin said this, and I will read it to you verbatim according to an ABC News transcript: “Absolutely not,” Sarah Palin says. “I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we’ve taken, that … that would … bring this whole … I’m not doin’ this for naught,” and that is a direct quote from Sarah Palin. Clearly, leaving open the possibility that she would be interested in leading the Republican Party in 2012 if she and John McCain were to lose this presidential contest right now….

Dana Bash: I just got off of the phone, Wolf, with a senior McCain adviser and I read this person the quote and I think it is fair to say that this person was speechless. There was a long pause and I just heard a “huh” on the other end of the phone. This is certainly not a surprise to anybody who has watched Sarah Palin that she is interested in potentially future national runs, and she is being urged to by a lot of people inside of the Republican Party if they do lose, but it is an “if” and people inside of the McCain campaign do not want any discussion that has an “if” in front of it six days before the election, they don’t want any discussion at all, any kind of hypothetical talk about running for the next time around. So certainly, this is not at least initially being received well inside of the McCain campaign.

Wolf Blitzer: I am not surprised, not surprised at all. It is one of those “wow, she is talking about 2012 if we lose,” that is not supposed to be something that you say. You are supposed to say, “well, I’m not looking ahead, I’m not looking ahead only to Tuesday,” and those are the talking points she’s supposed to be saying, but she is obviously blunt and she is looking ahead if something were to happen on Tuesday that she wouldn’t be happy with.

I just love the McCain campaign reaction to Palin’s naked ambition. I think Palin is going to be in for a pretty huge disappointment if she tries to run for president in 2012. Even if the excitement she generates in the conservative base is enough to carry her to the nomination, she has zero support outside of it. She alienates and scares most normal people, and she has done absolutely nothing to make herself believable as President Of The United States. Four more years as governor of Alaska will do nothing to change that. She would be toast.

Some dispatches from the right-wing cesspool of insanity that is the Our Country Deserves Better PAC’s “Stop Obama” tour.

Mother Jones provides a complete list of all the fact-free, paranoid anti-Obama memes that were on display. Some highlights:

– He doesn’t understand that inalienable rights granted by God are what make America great. America is a city on a hill and “there are those around Barack Obama who would extinguish those lights.”

– He and his supporters “vilify” anyone who questions him.

– He “mocked” and “laughed at” Joe the Plumber at a recent rally because Joe thought he could make $250,000 despite being a plumber.

– He is having talk show hosts who speak out against him “slaughtered,” by having Obama-friendly advertisers pull their contracts.

– He very likely will take away dissenters’ right to free speech if elected president, keeping them from publishing their views in the newspaper or from voicing them on television and radio. This is in part due to the “storm troopers around him.”

– He benefits from the fact that voters who oppose him are hesitant to declare their feelings publicly, for “fear of being attacked at their place of work, or in their homes, or their children being retaliated against in school.”

– He will try to “extinguish” our freedom of speech. Reporters who question Obama and Biden are already being “silenced.”

– He hasn’t come clean about his birth certificate or the country of his birth. While the speakers said they did not want to put on their “tin foil hat” and speculate about the nation of Obama’s birth, one said he would give only “even money” that Obama was born in the United States.

– He had the opportunity to join the military during the first Gulf War. Instead “he went to the University of Phoenix to write books about himself.”

– He continues to ignore the fact that we did find WMDs in Iraq. In fact, 500 tons of WMDS were transferred out of Iraq this year.

– His presidency “will change America as know it and love it, and not in a good way.”

– He would create an America characterized by “socialism and servitude.”

– He seeks to deny the American dream through wealth distribution.

– He has the middle class “in his sights.”

– He comes out of the Chicago Democratic machine, which spells politics M-O-B.

– He benefits from a biased liberal media. The LA Times, the NY Times, and the Washington Post are “organs of the Obama campaign.”

After repeated a litany of way-out-there Obama smears — the Senator had “mocked” Joe the Plumber, was “lip-locked with terrorists,” and wants an America that looks “like Venezuela under Hugo Chavez” — the proceedings were interrupted by a peeved audience member.

“This isn’t fair,” said Louana, a woman from Maryland who, as an Obama supporter, had wandered into the poorly lit room to see the spectacle. “Is anything you are saying based on fact?”

Williams announced that the time to take questions had arrived because “this woman here” – he points to Louana – “is having a stroke.”

(…)

As Williams declared that an Obama administration would deliberately prevent him from writing, expressing his opinions, or even having a job, Louana cried out: “You people watch too much Fox News.”

Organizers promised her a civil discussion of her objections, only to label her a “mind-numb robot” moments later. Eventually she was asked to leave the room, with Williams calling out behind her, “there goes the old woman.”

Crazy and mean – always a winning combination. I would love to see these freaks become the face of the Republican party. In fact, I think a large part of the reason McCain and the GOP are doing so poorly this year is that they’ve let the mask slip more than usual this year. Maybe the sight of a black presidential nominee horrifies them so much that they just can’t restrain themselves, or assume that everyone else in the country is as horrified as they are.

KEY LARGO, FL – Manigator flees arrest at a McCain rally where he bit a man he claimed was “Un-American.”

During a rally for the Republican presidential candidate, proceedings were halted by a sudden commotion at the back of the open air venue. A young Latino man was flailing hysterically at what appeared to be a small alligator biting his pants, while screaming “I told you man, I’m Puerto Rican!”

After being shaken loose, the creature yelled back, “Damn Mexicans, taking our jobs!” He then went on to make lurid passes at several of the campaign’s interns. The small cryptid slurred much of his speech and witnesses say he smelled of cheap whiskey.

Police and wildlife officers arrived on the scene shortly thereafter to apprehend the manigator. However, he avoided capture for thirty minutes while shouting expletives about being denied free speech. Eventually he was able to slip under a fence and make a run back to the swamp.

Police tracked Manigator through the swamp for hours, following a trail of empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, menthol cigarette packs, and frequent yells of “Get ‘er Done!”

Mrs. McCain… is also the Queen of Svalbard, the northernmost province of Norway. Although the archipelago is technically part of Norway, the Norwegian government leaves all authority over the province to Mrs. McCain.

“We have treaties and we have an armistice line. We don’t cross and thank heavens those creatures don’t cross either,” Morten Wetland, Norway’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations said through a translator.

The creatures that Wetland refers to, in addition to Mrs. McCain herself, include The United Tribes of the Three Polar Bear Legions as well as the Worg Enclave and the Sasquatch Nation.

While under McCain’s despotic rule, peace has been achieved among the bears, wolves and sasquatches. In Wetland’s own words, “Thank the heavens the Ice Witch does not turn her icy glare south. ”

Should Senator McCain lose his bid for the presidency, it is feared that Mrs. McCain will mobilize her minions from the ice kingdom to wage a war of revenge against America and her allies.

On the positive side, a polar bear/sasquatch invasion might be the only way to get our troops out of Iraq.

For those of you who do not travel in technogeeky circles, a case mod is essentially a PC in a custom wrapper. Instead of the standard PC case, it’s either inside a heavily modified case, or inside something that doesn’t typically hold a PC at all, like a stuffed beaver, or the USS Enterprise, just to name a couple of my favorites.

But none of those can compare to… this!

At long last, wearable computing has become a reality! And without sacrificing performance or style!

Why do our laws place so little importance on the integrity of our elections? I was reading this story about Republicans in VA pulling out the ol’ “Democrats vote on November 5th” gambit, and then towards the end, the story says that the VA government made it a class 1 misdemeanor to mislead people about where or when to vote.

Why is this not a felony??? Hell, perverting the democratic process should be considered treason. The dirty tricksters should be afraid to pull these stunts rather than saying “Hey, why not, what’s the worst that could happen?”

My mom just sent me this handy list of Republicans and conservatives who have endorsed Obama.

The GOP and the McCain campaign have become so corrupt, ugly, and out of touch with reality that even conservatives are disgusted. The ones who aren’t intellectually dishonest, morally bankrupt, say-anything, win-at-any-cost conservatives, anyway.

If you totally screwed the pooch and crashed our financial system, you should not be getting ginormous bonuses. If you are taking billions trillions of dollars in bailout money from the government because you crashed our financial system, you should not be handing out ginormous bonuses.

If Republicans were outraged about Reagan’s phony welfare queens driving Cadillacs, they should be beside themselves about this. Somehow rich people gaming the system or getting corporate welfare never seems to bother them, though. Maybe it’s a trickle-down thing.

At least three dozen workers at a telemarking call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being “dangerously weak on crime,” “coddling criminals,” and for voting against “protecting children from danger.”

Williams’ daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it’s located in Hobart, IN.

“They walked out,” Williams says of her daughter and her co-workers, adding that they weren’t fired but willingly sacrificed pay rather than read the lines. “They were told [by supervisors], `If you all leave, you’re not gonna get paid for the rest of the day.”

The daughter, who wanted her name withheld fearing retribution from her employer, confirmed the story to us. “It was like at least 40 people,” the daughter said. “People thought the script was nasty and they didn’t wanna read it.”

A second worker at the call center confirmed the episode, saying that “at least 30” workers had walked out after refusing to read the script.

“We were asked to read something saying [Obama and Democrats] were against protecting children from danger,” this worker said. “I wouldn’t do it. A lot of people left. They thought it was disgusting.”

Good for them. I really like these little reminders that despite the best efforts of the GOP and reality television, decency is still not entirely extinct.

Last week, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) squared off in a debate with Democratic challenger Bruce Lunsford. But on Lunsford’s podium a GOP operative had placed a small voice recorder, presumably to pick up some off-mic comments Lunsford might make — apparently a violation of the debate rules.

(…)

According to the Lunsford campaign, Lunsford actually didn’t see the recorder. But since it was nestled in among his papers it was included when he handed his papers off to his staffers after the debate — staffers who say they later erased the recording since it violated debate rules to have a planted recorder on the opponents podium.

According to the McConnell staffers, however, Lunsford did see the recorder during the debate and essentially confiscated it. Richard St. Onge, II (who, in a separate story, may have absconded with his name from some neo-gothic southern novel) is the GOP operative who planted the recorder. And according to St. Onge, when he went up to Lunsford after the debate to demand his recorder back, Lunsford said, “No you won’t get it back.”

And now St. Onge and the chairman of McConnell’s campaign have filed a criminal complaint against Lunsford for petty larceny and destruction of property — because of the erasure.

Wow, they tried to bug Lunsford and then filed charges against him when they got busted. Amazing.

“Hate is not a political party, policy statement, agenda or ideology – it is a pure evil that no place in civil society,” said Robin Smith, Chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. “Whether it is neo-Nazi skinheads plotting a racist shooting spree targeting Sen. Obama, or West Hollywood liberals hanging Gov. Sarah Palin in effigy and calling it ‘art,’ or unknown anarchists tossing bricks through the windows of a county Republican headquarters in Murfreesboro, Americans of all political views should be outraged.”

The Palin effigy was crude, but it’s breathtaking to compare that with indictments in a mass murder and assassination plot.

Yes, that’s right, they compared an effigy and some brick-throwing to a neo-Nazi murder spree. Shame is completely foreign to these people.

Amazingly, despite a grossly (deliberately?) inept DOJ prosecution, Ted Stevens has actually been found guilty of all seven counts of corruption, but apparently a felony a conviction is not enough to convince him to drop out of his Senate race:

I am obviously disappointed in the verdict but not surprised given the repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct in this case. The prosecutors had to report themselves to the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility during the trial for ethical violations. Exculpatory evidence was hidden from my lawyers. A witness was kept from us and then sent back to Alaska. The Government lawyers allowed evidence to be introduced that they knew was false. I will fight this unjust verdict with every ounce of energy I have.

I am innocent. This verdict is the result of the unconscionable manner in which the Justice Department lawyers conducted this trial. I ask that Alaskans and my Senate colleagues stand with me as I pursue my rights. I remain a candidate for the United States Senate.

I think this might be the opportunity the Alaska Independence Party has been waiting for.

I didn’t actually think I would end up at the Obama rally in Pittsburgh today, because the invite said it was at 3PM. But since people were still filing in when I got off work, I figured what the hell.

Unfortunately, since I didn’t think I would be there, I didn’t bother to take my camera along, so I couldn’t get any decent photos at all. And my Treo battery was almost dead, so I couldn’t even attempt to liveblog it (which probably would have been a bad idea on a cellphone anyway). Oh, and I was sitting behind a flatulent toddler. But, um, other than that, it was great! The audience was fired up, as you might expect.

Best quote, after he said something about McCain: “Don’t need to boo; just vote.” My favorite part, though, was when Obama returned to the theme of his 2004 keynote address, which has become especially relevant now: That despite what the Republicans say to try to divide us and make us hate and fear one another, we are still all Americans, and every part of America is, in fact, America.

Republicans have been calling Democrats un-American for as long as I can remember, and they’ve rarely been called on it, and never paid a price for it. Until this year.

Michelle Bachmann calls Obama and some indeterminate number of congresscritters anti-American, and ends up trying to backtrack as she finds herself suddenly trailing an unknown opponent who racked up a million dollars in donations in just a few days after she let her McCarthy freak flag fly.

Sarah Palin refers to the “real America” and the “pro-America” parts of the country, and ends up backtracking and trying to explain herself. As the McCain campaign sinks lower and lower into the gutter, so do its poll numbers. Sowing fear and hate and division is becoming toxic and shameful rather than just admirable hardball politics, and the Republican Atwater/Rove gameplan is no longer effective as a result.

Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea. To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune. To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president.

“My wedding ring, it’s in Todd’s pocket cause it hurts sometimes when I shake hands and it gets squished,” Palin told a crowd in Tampa, Florida. “A $35 wedding ring from Hawaii that I bought myself …’cause I always thought with my ring, it’s not what it’s made of, it’s what it represents and 20 years later, happy to wear it.”

Pay no attention to that $150,000 spending spree, and all those tens of thousands for hair and makeup. She (sometimes) wears a $35 wedding ring, so she’s just folks. She totally understands the problems of other ordinary middle-class people like her; which is to say, ordinary middle-class people with virtually limitless resources at their disposal.

Wow, so “lifelong Democrat who hasn’t wavered in his presidential vote since 1980” and war pimp Michael O’Hanlon finally, reluctantly endorses Barack Obama after being “unable to support [him] over the last two years.” And only because he thinks Joe Biden is a stronger running mate than Sarah Palin.

As the McCain campaign steadily defines deviancy down, it is also defining “small business” way up:

On Thursday in Sarasota, Governor Charlie Crist introduced J. Robert Long, the CEO of Marine Concepts as a “small businessman.” The man McCain dubbed “Bob the Boat Builder” spent, as Crist noted, most of his career at Wellcraft Marine, which reported revenues of $67 million last year, according to Yahoo! Finance.

Tonight in Colorado, Senator Lindsey Graham, a close friend of the McCains, described Cindy as “a great small businesswoman.” Her “small” business — Hensley & Co., a family-owned Anheuser-Busch distributor that is the third largest among the 800 in the country — had revenues of nearly $200 million last year, according to Yahoo.

Just keep this in mind the next time you hear McCain or his surrogates talking about tax breaks or other stimuli for “small business owners.”

“You look at some of things that both Senator Obama and (vice presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Joseph) Biden have said about McCain. One could say they’re intemperate,” Lieberman said.

He then went on to chide the media for “the demeaning of our politics by this kind of focus.”

Calling your opponent a terrorist is a little more than “intemperate,” Joe. If you had anything remotely resembling the mighty moral compass that you pretend to have, you would recognize that there is absolutely no equivalence here. You smarmy, dishonest little tick.